dalmemail, I never succeeded in booting Puppy in 16MB ram PCs. The only one who booted in 16MB was onebone that is a non-graphical puppy (no X server). If you try onebone, download the 'elinks' version, so you will be able to surf internet with elinks text web browser.

If you want X server, I think the best choice is Barebones 2.01r2: read my posts here and here. To install Puppy without wasting CDs, read here.

Turbopup is my preferred puppy in PCs with at least 128MB ram, I wouldn't use it in your PCs.

If you don't really need 30 PCs, you can pick up some RAM sticks from unneeded PCs and insert it in empty ram slots of another PC (I think pentium I motherboards need Edo Ram 72 pin, they need to be inserted in couples of 2) so to increase Ram to at least 32MB. Be sure to format your hard disc in ext2 and add a swap partition of at least 128MB (I hope you know how to use fdisk).

Kolibri is cute, but not so useful and lacks a real web browser. If you have 2 floppies, try Blueflops instead: a console only Linux distribution featuring 2.6.18 kernel, ethernet and serial modem ppp support, usb pendrive support, GRAPHICAL and text web browser. It can also boot from cd (download and burn the 'eltorito' iso) and hard disk using grub (kernel memdisk ; initrd blueflops-2.0.15.ElTorito-2.88-boot.img - rename it in shorter blueflops.img !).

Yes, or there's Basic Linux, which also runs off 2 floppies or a DOS partition on a hard drive. I remember running it on a Pentium 100, browsing the Web using Opera 5, and Blackbox for the window manager; happy days .

There are two different versions of Basic, BL2 and BL3;

http://mujweb.cz/basiclinux2/

http://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/

I had 32 MB of RAM to run it in though. I don't know how it'd be in 16 MB but it should be OK.

Failing that, you could set it up as a DOS computer, using either MS-DOS or FreeDOS and surf the Web in Arachne. I did that on a 486 (8 MB of RAM) at the start of the noughties.

Or; there used to be a floppy based demo of an operating system called QNX, which was absolutely amazing. It could write using a basic text editor, play a simple game (Tower of Hanoi if I remember rightly), and surf the net using dialup (and post on forums). All from one 1.44 MB floppy.

The only downside it had was that I never found a way to save the settings, so I had to reconfigure the Internet connection on it every time I used it._________________Acer Aspire M1610 (Core 2 Duo, 2.3 GHz), 3 GB of RAM, 320 GB hard drive running OpenSUSE 13.2 Edu-Life, Sparky 4.0 RC1, Neptune 4.3, Absolute 14.11, Korora 21 Mate, Vector 7.1 Light 64-bit, LXLE 14.04.2, Puppy Tahr 6.02 Mate and Puppy Precise 5.7.1 Large.

KolibriOS is a good system but Turbopup have got support and software.
THANKS

Okay. Once you get the operating system up and running, what software do you hope to be able to run, and what you do intend to do with the software? Even if you were to get the operating system to run in such small memory, you still face the fact that there is so little contemporary software that will be usable.

One big problem with using old hardware is that its circuit boards were made using standard quality ("cheap") components so it could at the time be priced competitively, so you'll keep running into problems of component failure or intermittent operation of the power supply, floppy disk reader, etc., and the HD will be well and truly past its expected life. You can go to a lot of trouble tinkering and fine tuning to set up a dozen P1's only to find you are plagued by unreliability. Even if you have squirreled away a dozen boxes of unused 3.5" floppy disks, you will be dismayed to find how few can be formatted today without bad blocks! And after a couple of uses, the 'goods' ones will be showing faults.

Actually I'm running Turbopup quite well on PIII - 600Mhz, 128 RAM, 512 MB SWAP partition.
Works fast as long as you don't use ram hungry applications. Default Seamonkey is old version and can't open some sites but it is still useful for such old hardware. I even can boot Turbopup from USB on this machine using Plop boot floppy disk.
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html
One disadvantage is the USB is mounted read-only and you can't use save file on it but you can have save file on the hard drive.

But with Processor 50-175 Mhz and 16-24 Ram I think it will be a pain for the user to use Turbopup even if it boots. I doubt that BTW.

As much as I hate to admit this but based on my experience with old hardware such yours, dalmemail, Windows 95 (maybe even 98 ) will work much better than any puppy available.

I agree with cthisbear...
But, in my opinion, the points are more or less as said by Shep:
- what is the target in terms of user friendly graphical interface for user
- what are the uses (and then the softwares) he wants.
If anyone would like to surf on web, then a lot of sites (maybe the main parts... ) need of graphical support and then that hw would be useless in every case.
If the target is only to write some text, with few extra needs, maybe some text editor from terminal could be enough...

I am uploading an updated ISO of Turbopup42v2 it has glibc2.10 and has firefox 17esr from Akita which more up to date than the old Seamonkey it had. It has QT and Xine. I forgot to install updated ffmpeg so the .pet is in the same folder. I also added Flburn as i uses very little resources and is very reliable. Everything else is the same as the program choices are still good for it's target machines.

I have now done an update of Synth's Extreme version of Turbopup which I am posting from which has the same Firefox ESR17 which works well with most sites as used in Akita.
Both use frisbee to connect which works nicely. The Extreme ISO includes ffmpeg update for mp4 playback using xine sorry gxine is non-functional in both.

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